"This, then is our desert:
to live facing despair,
but not to consent.
To trample it down under hope in the Cross.
To wage war against despair unceasingly.
That war is our wilderness.
If we wage it courageously,
we will find Christ at our side.
If we cannot face it,
we will never find him."

Thursday, 15 July 2010

A sense of disconnect

Looking around the 'liberal' Anglican websites, particularly Thinking Anglicans (I still think they have a nerve to call themselves that ) and WATCH ( see Ancient Briton's take on themhere) and most particularly at the comments left on the various posts, I'm struck by the sheer deracinated nature of the 'liberal' ('radical,' perhaps even 'mainstream' now in our new and final reformation settlement) view of the Christian faith - disconnected, uprooted and owing virtually nothing to what has gone before.
In comparison, the founders of the latitudinarian tradition in Anglicanism (even Tillotson) could seek immediate admittance to the Ordinariates (maybe that's stretching a point). Of course, they were largely Platonists, not like today's revisionists with their strange concoction of philosophies ranging from the frankly gnostic, and what sometimes reads like a compendium of patristic era heresies, to a kind of post-marxist, politically feminist, sub-Derrida deconstructionism, taking in virtually every 'Enlightenment' and post-Enlightenment opinion on the way. It's very hard at times even to trace the link between some of these attitudes and those of historic Christianity.
I suppose because of this our reaction should be one of prayer and profound sympathy to those who have been so deceived, an attitude conspicuously lacking in the sheer ruthlessness of their response to us.
But that no longer matters in a "democratic" synodical structure, something which increasingly seems incompatible with the nature of a true Christian Communion.
Never mind the theological 'debate.' It never mattered. They had the votes. We didn't.
It's time to turn our minds to another process: that of shaking the dust from our feet and moving on.

The essential problem was identified a long time ago. The behaviour of General Synod is just one of its manifestations: Authority.

The problem is that the General Synod believes itself to be, and acts like, the House of Commons. It does not behave as a synod of the Church. The Bishop Durham's parting shot at the last General Synod concerning what happens when the Church follows the fahsion of the world is already in the process of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.